Ann Arbor photographer Yana Benjamin recently won an award in Manfrotto ?Imagine More? contest with one of her wildly inspirational images. She will be attending the 68th Venice Film Festival to be awarded the Grand Prize for her work. ?The composition of the image is very complicated. The forms are created by juxtaposing reality with the surreal world. You really have to take a minute to think about the photo and its meaning,? Yana said about her winning photograph. Her image was selected from more than 7,000 photos, it will be included in a short presentation and unveiled for the first time on September 6th, 2011.
Yana will celebrate her success with an amazing Italian actress Violante Placido and photograph world renowned actors and celebrities on the red carpet. ?I know it is going to be a great experience. It is a once in a lifetime type of thing,? Yana said.
Her recent street photography work deals with the exploration of reality and the projections of reality. ?I photograph subtle feelings of human presence in an urban environment with empathy and compassion.? As Yana remarked, as a street photographer she is mainly interested in the narrative and visual connotations that can occur often by chance.
Working as a wedding photographer, she always captures the right moment, peoples' personalities and the spirit of ambience by introducing documentary techniques. Her photography is crisp, fresh, colorful and contemporary. ?Ordinary becomes extraordinary in the moment that I capture it with my camera, when the vision is distilled in a clear and absolute image,? Yana added and stressed that she sees a big difference in the method of street photography and wedding photography. ?Street photography is about seeing unseen, creating visually interesting comparisons, often pretty bizarre images, that can never be duplicated. In wedding, and generally speaking event photography, the scene is there; you are the observer not the creator, you just have to click at the right moment to capture it.?
Yana Benjamin grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia. She got her first camera, old Russian Zorki, for the ninth birthday. She graduated from Comenius University majoring in Journalism, moved to San Francisco a year later, in 2008 and recently relocated to start her photography business in the Ann Arbor area. Yana has been documenting life and creating breathtaking visual stories ever since. To view Yana`s work visit http://www.yanabenjamin.com
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